On the Audio Zendo

"What an excellent idea to raise people's interest for the meditative dimension of the home music listening.
Everything, in the brochure, speaks about the extreme passion and inner concentration experienced by the Audio Zendo people and by true audiophiles, this being rarely understood by their relatives.
It will no more be possible to call High-Fidelity reproduction a "hobby" or simple leasure (those qualifications distress me) after having read this brochure."
Albert Simon
UHF Magazine

Mutine Dealers

If you are looking for a listening venue to share your passion with competent professionals who privilege Music before any other consideration, Mutine has created for you the Audio Zendo. Discover them by clicking on the leaflet image:

For our American customers

For all your enquiries, please contact the following dealers:

East Coast and Central:
- Sound Mind Audio, Dallas, TX; (214) 770-2350.

West Coast:
- True Sound, Campbell, CA; (408) 370-7578.
- Blue Moon Audio, Oakland, CA; (510) 325-2440.

Please be sure to read the following text about the goals and philosophy or our business before contacting our dealers!

Mutine is based in Canada. Mutine’s founder Pascal Ravach came to Canada in 1996 from Europe, where over the previous two decades he had created a store called Présence Audio, then distribution companies in Switzerland, Germany and England. Pascal also has extensive experience in manufacturing: in the late 80s he acquired Oxford Acoustics (manufacturer of the award-winning Crystal Reference turntable) and in 2002 he established the Canadian manufacturing of Audiomat.

Since 1997 Mutine has served customers in both Canada and the United States. To distribute our fine audio products, we set up a network of dealers in both countries, from coast to coast. Mutine is a small company, with limited resources, and therefore we could not make our products widely available in the manner of some companies. That has always been just fine with us: we do not have aspirations of huge growth, and are content to serve a modest number of music lovers. We choose to do a small number of things very well, rather than to distribute many products through a large network of dealers.

Throughout the last ten years we have experienced great challenges in serving the American market. To give you an idea of these challenges, here is an excerpt from a letter from a former dealer. We have only deleted the names of other brands; otherwise the letter that you read here is exactly as it was sent to us:

“We do have an interesting market here.  I had a guy in my demo room that was looking for cables. He listened to the actinote cables vs the […] cables – everything else the same.  He preferred the sound with the actinote – but bought the […].  There’s nothing you can do with that.

I’ve had other situations where having your gear here has actually been a detriment for me.  I had a guy looking for a phono preamp.  He really liked the sound of my system – and the price of the phono amp.  But when I told him the brand ‘Audiomat’ – he lost interest in not only that but any other phono amp I had.  He was not interested in anything that he hadn’t heard a lot about – and if it sounded better than other things I had then there must be something better somewhere else.”

The US market is the most marketing-driven one we have ever seen in over three decades in the audio business. Our dealers have always found it difficult to transmit anything related to our values, like passion, musicality, system matching, complete study of the customers’ room acoustics, and ultimately: that the final complete system must not only represent value for the money invested, but equally important, only a well balanced system is able to release all the magic of the components we sell.

Based on our experiences over the last ten years, we have learned that most US audiophiles buy what is famous or established, not simply the best products. As you have just read in the letter above, it seems they are afraid to trust what they hear with their own ears.

We could double our prices to cover the costs of extensive advertising,  “lending” units to many reviewers to gain favorable attention, and the other practices used by many competitors. Even some of our own US dealers advised us to do this after the first glowing review of the Audiomat Arpège, but we did not agree. This is something we have always refused to do, because we prefer to bet on people’s capacity to exercise their own judgment.

Fortunately for us, the culture of our local market here in Canada behaves way closer to our philosophy, and our selected dealer network here continues to have success in selling our goods purely on their merits.

We select products very carefully, and we believe in a system approach. Although we do not sell our systems under a single brand name, nevertheless every component we consider for distribution is evaluated carefully and must be judged to work successfully with other Mutine products, or we will not import it. Products may have individual qualities of character and performance, but for us they really come to life when they are used in a complete Mutine system, where they will deliver emotional satisfaction that is simply not available anywhere else. Although we are happy to see an individual customer buy one of our products, it is our dream that this customer should experience the full potential of that product, and this will happen only through careful system-matching. (It is not a requirement that the system be all-Mutine, but someone with knowledge and experience must properly match the component to other parts of a system, in order for it to reach its potential.)

We adore music. We are not a home theater company. Our basic wish is so simple: for our customers to find peace, beauty and pleasure from music.

We have always set our prices low,  as a conscious act, to make our beautiful products accessible to music lovers. To achieve this goal:

• We live modestly, work hard, and put our time into things that we feel will be of real value to end users.

• We do not advertise heavily, as this would force us to raise the price of our products.

• We do not provide long-term “loaners” to reviewers, which are intended to curry favor with them and cause the component to be mentioned again and again in reviews.

• We do not push to have our products reviewed at every opportunity, but release products for review sparingly. (Despite this policy, our products are reviewed with consistent praise. A number of noted reviewers have purchased our components for their own pleasure, and as an aid in their evaluating other products.)

• We do not keep a large inventory, and therefore sometimes things are backordered. Our Audiomat amplifiers are built entirely by hand, by highly-skilled artisans, and the assembly of these components cannot be hurried; if there is a “run” on a certain model of amp, a customer may have to wait a few weeks to get the amplifier.

After ten years of selling products in the American market, we have decided to let our best US dealers take care of the entire support to the US end users, and to focus on the needs of our Canadian customers.

First there is the issue of price: Despite our commitment to keeping our products affordable, the fall of the U. S. Dollar has made these products far more costly for Americans to buy than they were just a few years ago. We regret this for our American friends but have no power to change it.

Next, there is the issue of dealer location and support: Canada’s population is concentrated in a band along the southern edge of the country, and our modest network of dealers seems to handle the needs of Canadian customers very well. (Canada accounts for the majority of our business, even though Canada’s economy and population are only a fraction of the size of those in the United States.)

For the U. S. market, our original plan was to establish a network of perhaps 30 dealers across the country who could sell our products.
Since 1997, we have opened and closed more than 70 dealers.
Over the years, we came to understand that American retailers must carry many competing lines, and faced with the pressures of overhead expenses and declining business, they may choose another product over ours because it represent a greater margin or easier sales. This may be a responsible decision for the store’s bottom line, but is it best for the customer? Is it best for us? We began with a few dozen dealers, carefully selected from hundreds who enquired about carrying Mutine products, but we found that these dealers were never able to carry our full line, and to sell Mutine systems. Instead, our products were sold as individual pieces, or were put into systems that were not able to bring out the best in our components.

As a result of all this, in 2008 Mutine will continue its dealer network in Canada, but will have a U. S. retail presence only in a few locations. We encourage any American customers to establish contact with these selected dealers. We have always been something of a hidden company anyway – names like Audiomat and Equation are not thrown about in the way that some brands are – and so we have always relied on true music lovers to find us . . .  to discover the satisfaction that up to now, they had dreamed of but never found.

Many people will scoff and say that we are arrogant. They will say that no one has heard of our products, and that they have not been reviewed or advertised enough. This is fine with us: we are a small company and we have no desire to please everyone! We encourage these people to go elsewhere for their music playback, and for their conversations. We welcome instead, genuine music lovers, who will hear our systems and really understand why we are dedicated to this work.

The U.S. is a gigantic place. We are not the first to realize this, nor will we be the last. To those who wish to audition our products, we offer the few places listed above. We recognize that the purchase of a fine audio system is not a matter to be treated lightly, and that some direct audition is important, wherever possible. If you contact a U. S. dealer, there may be some creative way that you can work out with them to hear our products without your having to travel to their showroom. That will be up to you to arrange.

With such a tiny dealer base in the U.S., much of our activity has to be based on faith. Our faith in our products and in our customers. And the faith of buyers that we represent a very special value and quality in today’s audio marketplace. Each year at the Montreal Audio Show, our systems are always voted among best. To read about this, go to this page.

If you are contemplating a Mutine product, our dealers may be able to provide comments from U.S. owners, who can give you their own impressions of the way our products perform in their systems. We encourage you to read the many reviews posted here on our site. If you can read French, you will find many additional reviews on the French side of the site.

We would caution you to avoid forming decisions based solely on posts in audio forums. The anonymity of these places gives a peculiar power to strangers, who can say whatever they like, in ways that would not be appropriate in face-to-face conversations. (Unfortunately, this is true for many product areas, and is not just confined to our audio passion: There is a new rudeness, boldness, and negativity that has arisen in these on-line forums.) It is our sad conclusion that some of the most vocal of these people choose to remain at their computers, talking about listening to music (and mostly talking about components) . . . instead of devoting more time to real music listening.

In our plans for 2008 and beyond, we have chosen to scale back from our network of the previous ten years. If you understand what we have discussed above, and value the soul of music as we do, we invite you to join us. You will find your way to Mutine despite the practical obstacles. We are concentrating our efforts on Canada, so we can do what we do, even better, but for any of our American friends who wish to join us, you will always have a valued place among us in our pursuit of pure musical pleasure.

Happy listening!

Mutine

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Reports on the history of Mutine, former exhibitions... you will find all this information on the "Mutine?" page.